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It is very easy to forget that high-tech engineer is a species that only thrives in politically stable countries.
Standing on the shoulders of giants is not only about your predecessors that solved engineering problems so you can dive even deeper - it is also about society which found better ways over time for effective financing that allows science&engineering to happen.
Also please read (for example) about Samsung and Nokia - they were forced to change industries by politicians in their respective countries.
I disagree, a lot of nations became stable because of engineering solutions in the first place and also more scientifically literate. There is a ton of examples of this. The first telescope, as an example, thanks to Hans Lippershey and Galileo Galilei showed that the earth wasn't flat and removed some power from the church it also clearly made us see that the sun doesn't go around the earth so it showed that Copernicus was right all along. A big discovery that made people doubt the christian religion and change the political landscape forever.
All big scientific discoveries changed the societies in a big way and there is no going back. Scientific discoveries and technological innovation is the only thing that push a society forward.
No, man, that's simply not true. That's an incredibly technocratic view of the world.
Using the U.S. as an example, the (belated) end of slavery in the U.S. didn't come about from a scientific discovery or a technological innovation. Technics played a part in the exacerbation of the issues, but it was politics, culture, language, religion and "spirit" that ended state sponsored slavery. I think that was a decently large push forward for society.
As an example, consider reformation: many attempts have been made at reforming the church, but the first successful one happened only after the printing press got widespread enough that the reformational thesis could spread around the Europe very quickly.
Or you could reasonably argue that the end of feudalism happened because of gunpowder and accessible firearms. Where previously a person had to train half of their life to be able to fight with an armoured knight, suddenly with firearms, anyone could become effective in the field in pretty much no time. This shifted power away from the local lords in a significant way.
There are plenty of similar examples you can find in all of history. You can probably shoot plenty of holes through them, too, but still, this for me sounds like a most plausible theory of social changes of the ones I heard.
Just ask the people that have a fulltime job but still cannot afford a place to live if slavery has ended. But sure, politics can change some things but in the end it doesn't change much.
To add to my point, politics may alter how we live but it doesn't bring anything new into the world. If we want to progress, we need to solve issues and take away the need for people to do stuff we don't want them to do. If you had todays farming equipment for example, there would never had been any slaves because one machine can do the job of hundreds of slaves. The machine doesn't have to be fed and managed, the machine doesn't fight back.
I believe we can solve any such problem with technological advancement and thus our money should be heavily invested there.
Who wants to live in a technologically sophisticated world if most of the spending goes to war, surveillance, bailing out rich bankers, healthcare insurance, and just housing, anyways?
What if you would reverse that? Don't you think we would be better off in every way possible?
That the Earth is not flat has been known since ancient times. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_flat_Earth.
With increased technology it was easily disproven.
